and even here at DU, there is far less interest in what is happening in Iraq than in earthshaking questions about when one should change churches and how dangerous things were at an airport on Yugoslavia ten years ago.
The Bush/Cheney political strategy continues to work perfectly as the gouge of the Federal Treasury continues at full throttle while almost everybody in a position of influence within the USA is obsessed with something else, anything else.
Once again, that passage from Ron Suskind about his conversation with a Bush Administration figure explains the current situation perfectly:
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
The realities that all of us in the reality based community have been wrestling with began with Weapons of Mass Destruction, then shifted to Removing An Evil Dictator, then shifted to Spreading Democracy, then shifted to The Surge Is Working -- and the next reality will be that Iran Is About To Take Over Iraq.
What is the common denominator of all of these various realities? War profits.
And as the story keeps changing, the one thing that is always impossible is to end the occupation.
And all this has become boring. Even at Democratic Underground.
I am losing my faith in American Democracy.